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Regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or ecosysytem, children play in similar ways when they have safe free time in nature.

-Children and Nature Design Principles (Ch.3) Sobel

Knowledge, in my opinion, is perpetual when gained through experience. We learn not to play with fire because our bodies endure pain at first encounter. We know which foods we like best because we eat them and develop a sense of taste. We have the ability to know through our use of senses; sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. We can only gain true knowledge when we encounter and expose ourselves to an environment.

Instructors, guides, and even teachers can profess and stress the importance of the environment, but ultimately it means nothing if all they do is talk about it. Students will only have an idea, an imagination in their mind, never knowing the impact of the full ability of their senses. The environment will mean nothing if students never have an experience with it. As environmentalists, we can’t force the importance and value nature has for us upon others because we don’t all share the same values. We can’t assume that everyone has the same opportunities as others to experience the environment a certain way because we don’t all have the same access. We can’t teach the importance of environmental education if we can’t allow our students to dance with the universe.

I want to preface this paper by saying a few things about my growing understanding of ecological thought. I have found that this process of thought is really about process of thought itself. Ecological education is a space where I study the process of my thinking, what triggers my thinking, where it pulls me, from what it pushes against, the ravines into which I fall, and the valleys in which I find myself hopelessly spinning (or wondrously dancing, depending on the atmosphere), where I can sit on the stump of a fallen tree or city street curb and embrace the full access I have to my own mind, style, and words. As a 360, we have well discussed the notion of education not needing to be confined in the walls (be they plaster-white or flashy with rainbow alphabet trains and glamourous posters illustrating parts of speech or the quadratic formula) of a classroom. Education and learning happen everywhere else too: watching clouds in the sky, sitting in a city park, smoking in a jazz club, browsing through a yellow-paged bilingual dictionary, and twiddling your thumbs during a Ukrainian Catholic mass drenched with incense and harmonies of perfect fifths. Most fundamentally, though, it occurs within my mind and my body. If that is the fundamental, then I need to begin there. This paper may feel segmented, but then, life occurs in segments and unrelated events and thoughts. The only thing sometimes connecting events is the passage of time within the body experiencing the events, and that fluidity itself is often what causes connections to make sense.

 Climate Change Affecting Earth Through Time

Rationale:

For this curriculum I wanted to see how a classroom of 5th grade students would react to climate change and predict what climate change will do to their neighborhoods. Throughout this semester in the Ecoliteracy 360 I have been very interested in the idea of perception. Specifically I was interested in how others react to the five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. Depending on a location of a school or of someone’s home they will perceive their neighborhood in a different way than another.

Curriculum Unit Overview and Objectives:

    On January 9, 2014, several thousand gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) spilled from a ruptured tank a Freedom Industries’ storage facility into the Elk River just 1.5 miles upstream from West Virginia American Water’s regional intake which supplies water to nine counties in the Kanawha Valley area (Kloc). Just ten days later on January 19, government officials lifted the Do-Not-Use order on municipal water use that had been put into effect following the spill claiming the water was safe to use and effectively ending compensatory actions (i.e. supplying clean bottled water free of charge to communities in need). Needless to say the water was far from clean by this point. What, then, should the communities of southern West Virginia do? How did this spill happen and who bears the blame? What is it about this chemical that makes the water toxic and why was it neat the river in the first place? How can a disaster like this be prevented? Who needs to do something and what should they do? Environmental disasters like the contamination of West Virginia’s water often leave more questions than answers, but these questions are not without purpose. Rather, using this one particular disaster as a case study, one can examine the nature of environmental disasters and the subsequent actions and outcomes from a host of different perspectives: the political, the economic, the social, at the community level, at the state level.

Throughout my time in our Eco-Literacy 360, I have grown to have a better understanding of what it means to be thinking and acting ecologically, honoring the ‘environment’ as an intrinsic aspect of our lives as individuals, and of the communities that we are part of. Teaching and learning with the intentions of ecological literacy can have mind-opening effects on how we perceive and interact with the world, its people, and the environment. With this in mind, I want to take my curriculum to where eco-literacy has been most present in my life and the lives of many of my friends and family members. My curriculum is designed in a very location-oriented fashion, as a learning experience for the oldest age group at Camp Galil. Galil is one of many camps that make up the Labor Zionist Youth Movement “Habonim Dror”, and is located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The ideology of Habonim Dror is based on five pillars: Progressive Labor Zionism, Judaism, Socialism, Social Justice, and Hagshama (actualization of values).  These ideals are rooted in the Hebrew phrase “Tikkun olam”, or “repairing the world”, and are the basis of the unique experience that is Galil. This ideology plays a strong part in generating its eco-centric, environmentally conscious community, but I also see eco-centricity rooted in the camp’s physical location, the style of interaction between peers and between counselors and campers, as well as in the playful, fun-spirited, and non-traditionally educational learning that takes place.

            During the second semester of my freshman year of college, I took a course in Bryn Mawr’s sociology department entitled “Punishment and Social Order”.  Before taking this course, I knew almost nothing about prisons, either in America or elsewhere, and I’d never really questioned the role that prisons play in our society.  Throughout the course, as I learned about how mass incarceration in the US functions as a racialized form of social control analogous to Jim Crow, and how the system results from and perpetuates capitalist inequalities, I became increasingly convinced that, to achieve social justice, prisons need to be abolished.  Because of this class, I am now seriously considering working on prison abolition after graduation.

            For me, this experience is my personal window into a question I have struggled with for this entire semester: Can education be used to create social change?  And if so, how?

RATIONALE

Three years ago, my younger sister Julie began her middle school at REALMS (Rimrock Expeditionary Alternative Learning), a charter school in our hometown Bend, Oregon. The school’s purpose is to

 “foster scholarship, strengthen community, and inspire stewardship through active learning by actively challenging our students to investigate, understand, and become stewards of the human and natural world around us. To do so, we pursue experiences both inside and outside the classroom that help our students develop a core set of academic skills and learning habits; that encourage them to explore and identify their values; and that foster the inspiration that comes through service to others and adventure” (REALMS 1).

During the sixth grade, my sister and her classmates spent a significant amount of time in and out of the classroom exploring sustainable systems and structures in Portland, Oregon. The students learned about sustainable architecture in class for a couple of months leading up to a field trip which offered Julie and her classmates the opportunity to tour sustainable schools and other facilities throughout Portland. Following their trip, the sixth grade students presented their observations to their fellow students, teachers, and families. I had the privilege of attending this culminating presentation a couple of years ago, and was struck by how much the students learned on their trip and the autonomy they had in creating and carrying out the presentation.

I agree with aphorisnt and I also find myself thinking about today's conversation and processing today--and this whole semester. I too feel as if there are times I didn't really allow for absolute and complete porosity of my life, my thoughts, my pursuit of the knowledge and learning we were doing in context to the class and the space that was created with this 360 dynamic.  I was used to compartamentalizing. I was scared to used Serendip, to have my voice and my words being so naked and out there. What if I was wrong? But then, I kept thinking of the progress I felt I had gained in my own experiences. I hesitate even know to bring it back to my own experience. It seems too centric of me, me, me. But that is also the only way I could frame being in this 360. Today, when we were writing, I was at a loss for words. I found myself too facing the tiger, language failing me. But I remembered, I remembered that when all is said and done, when everything has happened, when we plan and go about life, no matter what the end result is, no matter how hard or difficult or twisty and curvy the path may have been to get where you are, my mother always reminded to take a step back to say alhumdullilah. Thanks be to God. Thanks doesn't become to cover the sentiment and connotation of alhumdullilah. In it's purest form it's aknowledging the existence and utter nature of this world as being just the way it is. Sometimes, I think about how our environment shapes us. What does is truly mean to be "eco-literate" ?

resonant words from Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House:

“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may,
that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places
of life.”

[can you tell that i'm still talking w/ you all....? from my couch....?]

still mulling over much of what we said during our shared evaluation this afternoon,
including the report that the dynamic among the three disciplines was a source of tension,
with econ not working very well in concert w/ the other courses (in part because there
were non-360 students in it, and/but/also....?)